What Is Growth Marketing & Why Do You Need It?

With the market evolving very quickly and individual companies struggling to survive, it is really hard to stand out these days, especially for new companies.

Content

Introduciton

What is Growth Marketing?

What are the Benefits of Growth Marketing?

How Growth Marketing Differs from Conventional Marketing Strategies

Basic Elements of a Growth Marketing Strategy

Growth Marketing Channels

Tactics and Strategies for Growth Marketing

Metrics You Should Pay Attention To

What is the Growth Marketing Team Doing and What Are They Responsible For?

Conclusion

FAQ

Introduction

To overcome this challenge, it is necessary to come up with strategies that are creative, engaging and mutually beneficial for both the company and its customers. 

One such approach is growth marketing, which prioritises customer needs and seeks to build strong relationships beyond simply acquiring customers.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a customer-centric marketing approach that focuses on rapid and sustainable business growth. Unlike traditional marketing, which often emphasizes brand awareness and advertising, growth marketing is a data-driven approach that uses experimentation, optimization and personalization to achieve set goals. 

The goal of this type of marketing is to build strong, long-term relationships with customers by delivering valuable experiences at every touchpoint in the customer journey. By understanding and satisfying customer needs and preferences, companies can increase customer loyalty, subsequent retention and ultimately ensure sustained growth.

What are the Benefits of Growth Marketing?

• Faster time-to-market: growth marketing emphasizes experimentation and optimization, allowing you to test and iterate different marketing strategies quickly. This leads to faster time to market for new products, features or campaigns.
  
  
• Higher ROI: Growth marketing aims to achieve sustainable growth through data-driven experimentation and personalized experiences. By optimizing for lifetime value and customer retention, companies can achieve a higher return on investment (ROI) from their marketing activities.
  
  
• Scalability: with growth marketing, companies can quickly expand their successful marketing activities and channels to deliver desired results. This enables efficient use of resources and better allocation of budgets.
  
  
• Emotional connection with customers: Growth marketing takes a customer-centric approach and prioritises the needs and preferences of the audience. By providing a personalised experience at every touch point, companies can establish a strong emotional connection with their customers and increase customer loyalty.

How Growth Marketing Differs from Conventional Marketing Strategies

If you only focus on performance marketing, inbound marketing or other specific types of marketing, it can prevent you from reaching your full potential. 

A more balanced and integrated approach that takes into account different marketing channels and methods is often needed to achieve marketing and sales goals.

The limitations of each approach are the reason why growth marketing is almost essential. 

It brings all areas together to determine the optimal strategy for expanding your business, while also achieving satisfactory results.

Companies that need growth marketing are usually in one of these situations:

• As a startup owner with a lack of marketing experience, you may have trouble effectively promoting your business
  
  
• Although your website is receiving impressive organic traffic, your support channel is not experiencing meaningful growth
  
  
• If you're launching a new product, developing a solid go-to-market strategy is crucial to success
  
  
• With growing demand for your product but limited resources, building meaningful relationships with potential customers can be challenging
  
  
• Despite having a large budget for marketing campaigns, you may not be seeing the required return on investment (ROI)
  
  
• Improving branding across all platforms can be a key factor in growing your business
  
  
• If you have lots of valuable content but don't know how to market it effectively, your business could be missing out on potential growth opportunities

If your business is struggling with any element of the AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral or Revenue) system, a comprehensive growth marketing strategy can help.

Growth Marketing VS. Digital Marketing

With many different types of marketing, it can be difficult to understand what marketing your business needs. A common mistake business owners make is thinking that digital marketing and growth marketing are the same thing.

When looking at these two types, it is important to note that they differ in their approach. Digital marketing encompasses all marketing strategies that are used in the digital environment, such as search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and online advertising.

Growth marketing emphasizes the primary goal, data analysis, testing and optimization, not just creating tactics. While it uses many digital marketing strategies, its primary focus is on maximizing growth throughout the entire purchase funnel that leads to measurable business progress.

Growth Marketing VS. Growth Hacking

As you can guess, growth hacking is not the same as growth marketing. Growth hacking focuses on short-term results, while growth marketing focuses on the bigger picture. Here's a deeper look at the differences between the two:

• Approach: Growth marketing is customer-centric, prioritizing the customer journey and building long-term relationships. In contrast, Growth hacking is a more experimental, data-driven approach that focuses on finding creative and cost-effective solutions for rapid growth.
  
  
• Goals: the ultimate goal of growth marketing is to achieve sustainable growth by optimizing customer acquisition, retention and loyalty. In contrast, the goal of growth hacking is to achieve rapid growth in a short period of time, often using unconventional or viral marketing tactics.
  
  
• Timeline: Growth marketing is a long-term approach that focuses on building a strong brand and cultivating a loyal customer base. In contrast, growth hacking prioritizes quick wins and immediate results.
  
  
• Strategies: Growth hacking strategies, on the other hand, often involve more experimental tactics and non-traditional marketing channels such as social media or viral marketing.
  
  
• Team structure: growth marketing typically requires a cross-functional team that works across marketing, sales, product development and other areas to achieve the goals. In contrast, growth hacking often relies on small, agile teams that can move quickly and experiment with new ideas.

Basic Elements of a Growth Marketing Strategy

Every growth marketing strategy should take into account key metrics such as customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, customer retention rates and customer lifetime value.

As a guide, here are some proven techniques that growth marketers use to attract, convert, build and retain connected customers. 

This approach is commonly used in e-commerce, but has the potential to be highly profitable for traditional companies as well.

Marketing Across Different Channels

A multi-channel marketing strategy allows companies to communicate with potential and existing customers through their preferred channels. 

It follows that the approach a business takes when communicating with its customers on Facebook may differ from the way it communicates with them on Instagram, via email or on its website.

A/B Testing

Using A/B testing, companies can compare the similarities and differences between two different options. 

This type of testing can be used to assess the effectiveness of a particular marketing method, communication channel or content type. 

By using A/B testing, companies can gain insight into which option is more successful and why this may be the case.

Customer Life Cycle

In order to understand its customers, a company must continuously follow them on their buying journey - from the first moment to the moment they become loyal customers. To make this activity as effective as possible, it is a good idea to use the simplified three-stage AARRR model: activation, nurture and reactivation.

Growth Marketing Channels

No matter why you are trying to grow your business, you need to focus on the following key areas of growth marketing to achieve lasting success:

• Keyword analysis: perform an analysis to find relevant words and phrases that you can use to optimize your content
  
  
• Blog content creation: Write articles with strong call-to-action to turn readers into leads
  
  
• Content Repurposing: Share newly created content across multiple platforms
  
  
• Automated Email Marketing: Use data to engage and convert leads
  
  
• Targeted email campaigns: Send messages tailored to each stage of the customer's buying journey
  
  
• Affiliate marketing: leverage promotions, discounts and third-party partnerships to reach new audiences
  
  
• Offline advertising: Use TV, radio and billboards to reach specific demographics and build brand awareness
  
  
• Social and display ads: Use remarketing to target those who have shown interest in your company in the past
  
  
• Traditional PR: Use blogs, TV, newspapers and print publications to reach a wider audience
  
  
• Non-traditional PR: Use non-traditional tactics to quickly gain attention and interest
  
  
• Trade shows: Attend industry meetings and network with key players
  
  
• Sales: Improve your sales team, sales channels and customer support to achieve your marketing goals
  
  
• Community Building: Engage with communities and benefit from their demographic similarities

Tactics and Strategies for Growth Marketing

Add Various Discounts to Your Featured Package or Product

If you want to grab the attention of your target audience, you can create a product you recommend with its own landing page and ask customers to share it. 

To make the product even more attractive, try adding various promotions such as discounts for new users, discounts for buying multiple products or services, annual discounts, limited edition discounts, etc.

Make it Fun for Your Customers

Make onboarding new and potential customers an exciting and, most importantly, enjoyable process. For example, take the time to design a game where meeting each milestone will reward customers with new features. 

For example, set a goal of 500 new customers and offer them a reward every time they reach that milestone. This will not only get you better customer engagement, but also motivate them to get involved in the game.

Offer Exclusivity

If a product or service is exclusive and reserved for a select group of users or for a limited time frame, people tend to be more interested. This is why many companies use the strategy of offering exclusivity to their potential customers. 

It's a very effective tactic when launching a new product because the more urgency you create around its availability, the more people you attract to it. Instead of making the product widely available from the start, it can be more effective to limit its availability and entice people to seek it out on their own.

Involve Your Audience in the Creative Process

To achieve success, it's crucial to correctly gauge how your audience perceives your business. So why not seek their cooperation when introducing a new product, website or marketing campaign? 

You can send your existing and potential customers an invitation to participate in a competition, with the winning participant becoming a brand ambassador. 

In addition, you can offer the winner the opportunity to visit your business to observe behind-the-scenes activities. This approach will strengthen relationships with your customers while increasing the transparency of your business.

Provide Something Completely Free

This tactic is very effective for services, especially for platforms and various applications, but it can be adapted for products as well. 

Identify a key feature of your product or service that you can offer people to try for free and that is compelling enough to get them to buy. 

Treat this free feature as a lure and track how many users return to purchase the product or service after trying the free feature.

Metrics You Should Pay Attention To

Since growth marketing is completely dependent on data, it's easy to monitor whether your strategy is aligned with your goals. By systematically tracking these metrics, you can improve your performance and optimization in a timely manner:

• Website traffic: track direct, organic or channel-driven traffic to your website
  
  
• Lead generation: track the number of marketing-qualified (MQL) and sales-qualified leads (SQL) your business is generating
  
  
• Email marketing: track metrics such as open, click-through, response and conversion rates
  
  
• SEO effectiveness: measure your performance based on organic keywords and website traffic
  
  
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): the projected revenue you earn each month
  
  
• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): Evaluate your revenue generation potential at the customer level
  
  
• Customer Retention: Track the number of upsells, cross-sells, and churn to make you more likely to retain customers
  
  
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Calculate the total expected revenue from a single customer over a period of time
  
  
• Paid Marketing: Analyze return on ad spend (ROAS), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and conversion rates for ROI on paid marketing
  
  
• Activation Rate: Measure the number of new users who take a predetermined action within a specific timeframe
  
  
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Evaluates the return on investment over a one-year period
  
  
• Revenue Churn: Calculate a company's lost revenue over a specific time period
  
  
• Revenue Churn Rate: Evaluates the percentage of subscribers/customers who have not renewed or cancelled their subscription within a specific time period

What is the Growth Marketing Team Doing and What Are They Responsible For?

• Lead Growth Executive: Builds agile organizations to support growth
  
  
• Growth Product Manager (PM): Focuses on specific business metrics across the marketing funnel to drive revenue and profits
  
  
• Growth Engineer: Innovates and improves products through data-driven testing
  
  
• Growth Designer: Develops product strategy, interaction, UX design and user empathy
  
  
• Growth Developer: Implements growth techniques on the back-end and front-end of all platforms and applications
  
  
• Social and Community Manager: Improves communication and presentation to online audiences
  
  
• Data Analyst: Collects, filters and presents data to help the company make data-driven growth marketing decisions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, growth marketing is an important and versatile approach designed for business growth that every company should consider. By focusing on the entire customer journey and using data-driven experiments, growth marketing enables companies to optimize their strategies and achieve sustainable, long-term growth. 

Regardless of industry or company size, growth marketing can provide valuable insights and help you determine the most effective strategies to achieve your goals. By applying growth marketing, you will be better prepared to adapt to ever-changing market conditions and continuously improve your efforts to attract, retain and refer customers, ultimately driving your business to new heights of success.

FAQ

1. What is growth marketing? 

Growth marketing is an experimental approach that is based on data. It focuses on optimizing the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention. It aims to identify the most effective strategies to achieve sustainable and long-term growth for a company.

2. How does growth marketing differ from traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing focuses primarily on awareness and acquisition, while growth marketing covers the entire customer journey, including activation, retention and referral. Growth marketing emphasizes data analysis, experimentation, and optimization that lead to continuous improvement.

3. What are the key strategies of growth marketing?

Popular growth marketing strategies include content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and referral programs. Growth marketing professionals often use a combination of these strategies to achieve their goals.

4. What role does data play in growth marketing?

Data is crucial in growth marketing because it allows marketers to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and identify areas for improvement. Marketers engaged in this type of marketing use data to test hypotheses, monitor performance and optimize their strategies to achieve better results.

5. How do I get started with growth marketing?

• Analyze your target audience and their needs
• Define clear and measurable goals for your business
• Develop a plan that includes different strategies
• Track key performance indicators (KPIs) and analyze data to measure success
• Continuously test, iterate and optimize your strategies

6. What skills are important for a growth marketer?

A successful marketer should have strong analytical thinking, creativity, problem-solving ability and excellent communication skills. He or she should also be knowledgeable about various digital marketing channels and strategies, as well as data analysis tools and software.

7. Can growth marketing work in any company?

Growth marketing can be effective for businesses of all sizes in a variety of industries. However, it is essential to tailor growth marketing strategies to the specific business, target audience and goals.